1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computers and computer networks. More particularly, the invention relates to biometric voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) verification and targeting using hierarchical real-time speaker recognition.
2. Background of the Related Art
Government Internet surveillance (or IP surveillance) has been a hot topic of discussion over the past several years. The key issue for the government is to strike a middle ground where the surveillance program focuses only on “potential” suspects, but not on “all” citizens or residents. The complexity of implementing such a solution that satisfies this middle ground is illustrated as the following scenario. The government has identified a potential suspect and a VoIP (Voice over IP) phone number that he/she had used before. Let us assume that the government has a warrant to monitor all activities of this suspect. A typical approach that the government uses today is to monitor all activity of the VoIP phone number (that the suspect had used sometime before) by recording all incoming and outgoing calls. If the VoIP phone is not used by the suspect, but by someone else then the government is spying on a person that they do not have permission to monitor. Given that it is extremely hard to find out in real time whether the person talking on the phone is the suspect or not, the above approach is the best option for the government to accomplish the surveillance task. However, this raises the question of privacy for non-suspects.
In the same scenario above, let us now consider the possibility that the suspect starts using a new VoIP phone number for his/her communication in order to hide his/her identity. Given that the government only targets the old VoIP phone number of the suspect and is unaware of his new phone number, it will not be able to monitor the suspect despite knowing that there is a potential danger from the suspect.